All Quiet On The Western Front (26:06)
The Top 100 Project’s Numero 7 film takes us into the depths of World War 1 with 1930’s All Quiet On The Western Front. Listeners will get to hear us pontificate about the movie’s technical excellence yet problematic dialogue, its massive influence on the war flicks that followed, and how we are asked to sympathize with our wartime enemy. Bev even finds time to rip on Steven Spielberg a few more times! The ‘cast is yours…
T100P 
Looks like Mimi Leder might be on board to direct, and Harry Potter’s name has been thrown around to star. Is there anything he can’t do?
http://www.hollywood.com/news/movies/7821173/mimi-leder-to-remake-all-quiet-on-the-western-front?page=all
It’s a wonderful novel too.
Hi Bev and Ryan! Great podcast on AQOWF. A little after half way through this you said something along the lines of ‘I don’t know if war fever could take us the same way’ – regarding the pro-war character mindsets in the film. I saw this movie shortly after 9/11 and I recall thinking how a lot of the same gung-ho patriotic rhetoric was all around on TV and print media at the time even in Canada – certainly once “we” went into Iraq.
Thanks, Simon!
Your 9/11 point is a good one. I guess my best answer to that is that there were plenty of people who were skeptical about phony patriotism and misplaced rage soon after 9/11. It wasn’t even just Iraq. People probably understood that retaliating against the Taliban and Bin Laden was necessary, but even the way the U.S. handled that was biased and not everyone liked how the retaliation was done. Reporters shouldn’t be cheerleading these kinds of things. There was clearly a lot more debate and anger over Iraq (from people like us, at least). I guess that’s what I was focusing on when I made that point in the AQOTWF podcast: people like us are well-enough informed that we won’t just fall in line and chomp at the bit to get our hands on “the enemy” just because the Kantoreks of the world tell us we have to. Back 100 years ago, I don’t think the Average Joe had as much information and access to information as we do.